The White House and the Department of Justice (DOJ) worked together to conceal the discovery of President Joe Biden’s classified documents for months, according to The Washington Post (WaPo).
Days after the first trove of documents was discovered at the Penn Biden Center, a senior official in the DOJ wrote a letter to Biden’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer, asking for him to cooperate in the inquiry, WaPo reported.
The official also asked Bauer to get the documents but to not look inside, and requested for him to disclose where more documents could be located, according to the outlet. More documents were discovered at Biden’s Delaware residence Dec. 20, Jan. 10 and Jan. 11.
The White House had initially endeavored to find out how the documents had gotten to the Penn Biden Center and other locations, but on Nov. 10, the DOJ said it would be taking over the investigation, two anonymous sources told WaPo.
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco refused to say Wednesday if law enforcement officials told Biden administration officials to stay quiet, according to the outlet.
Although the documents were originally discovered Nov. 2, the news was kept hidden for months and only surfaced after CBS published a report Jan. 9. The White House Counsel office refused to tell the Daily Caller when Biden first knew of the documents, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that the press office knew nothing of the documents until the CBS report.
Biden downplayed the significance of the classified documents on Thursday and said he has “no regrets.”
“I have no regrets in following what the lawyers have told me what they want me to do, it’s exactly what we’re doing. There’s no there there,” Biden said.
“Look, as we found a handful of documents that were filed in the wrong place, we immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice department. We are fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly. I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there,” he added.
The top leader of the United Nations urged politicians to make unpopular decisions that may benefit their people in the long run after making a “special address” at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres criticized politicians around the world for caring more about “polls, future elections, [and] political power struggles” than “effectively solving problems.” He called for them to ignore polls reflecting their people’s will and instead do what they think is best for the long-term future.
Recommended for you
“Politicians need to understand — and sometimes we are faced with these kinds of challenges — it is better to take today decisions that will eventually be not popular, but that will be essential to be able to shape the public opinion itself,” Guterres said.
WEF | Davos Agenda 2023 UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres wants politicians around the world to shape public opinion themselves based on making decisions that will eventually be 'not popluar':
He made the remark about 20 minutes and 15 seconds into the presentation, which is viewable on the WEF website. It was preceded by a 15 minute “special address” where he said the battle against climate change “is being lost” and the people of the world must “end our self-defeating war on nature.”
He was responding to a question from WEF President Børge Brende, who asked why leaders don’t follow the “common sense” that dictates they must work now to stem off a future “climate disaster.”
Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, went on to speak from his own experience.
Recommended for you
“When I was following the polls, I would have problems in the short term,” he said. “When I was able to show leadership and … take the decisions that were necessary to ensure the future of my country at the time, that in the end would pay.
“My appeal to decision makers in the public and private sector is: Don’t look about what’s going to happen to you tomorrow. Look into what’s going to happen to all of us in the future.”
More than 2,700 world leaders, including 11 members of Congress, are spending this week at the Davos meeting, where they’re discussing ways to manage the global system. This year’s event involves speeches and panel discussions on issues like recession fears, the Ukraine war and climate change.
Fox News reports that shocking video has surfaced of Ohio school officials discussing how they can push Critical Race Theory (CRT) covertly, working around school policies already in place and “tricking” parents.
“It should be a parent and school partnership, and it’s really not,” said Protect Ohio Children Coalition co-chair Cathy Pultz, a former teacher herself, on Fox & Friends First Thursday. “In our district in Upper Arlington, the transparency has been a problem for years. They have their agenda. They get caught doing something. They get caught reading books without telling the parents. And they turn around and say, we’re going to do an investigation, but then nothing happens.”
“There have been no consequences for any of our teachers or staff when they’re breaking board policy, and it is really frustrating,” she continued. “And this is just another example of parents losing control of what’s being taught to their children.”
The video, showing Ohio school officials discussing how they can secretly advocate the controversial content even if the state banned it, was released by a conservative media watchdog, Accuracy in Media.
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” Matthew Boaz, the executive director of diversity, equity and inclusion of Upper Arlington Schools, said. “You can pass a bill that you can’t teach CRT in a classroom, but if you didn’t cover programming, or you didn’t cover extracurricular activities or something like that, that message might still get out. Oops.”
“If we have a certain content that we want to share with students, and they see one in word the language, it’s like, oh, no, we can’t do that,” Hillary Staten, an administrative assistant for Groveport Madison schools, said in the video. “We have some parents… they don’t fully understand. So… it’s when we trick them, you know?”
Upper Arlington interim Superintendent Kathy Jenney wrote Wednesday, “While we remain committed to DEI, critical race theory is not part of the district’s academic program,” it continued. “The district follows the state learning standards and all laws in effect related to public education.”
This is the lie the Left always pushes: “We’re not teaching CRT in schools, you right-wing conspiracy theorists!” The truth is that CRT is being taught everywhere from pre-K through grad school, only it’s rarely actually called CRT.
Founded by the late Derrick Bell, critical race theory is an academic discipline which maintains that society is divided along racial lines into (white) oppressors and (black) victims, similar to the way Marxism frames the oppressor/victim dichotomy along class lines. Critical race theory contends that America is permanently racist to its core, and that consequently the nation’s legal structures are, by definition, racist and invalid. As Emory University professor Dorothy Brown puts it, critical race theory “seeks to highlight the ways in which the law is not neutral and objective but designed to support white supremacy and the subordination of people of color.”
A logical derivative of this premise, according to critical race theory, is that the members of “oppressed” racial groups are entitled—in fact obligated—to determine for themselves which laws and traditions have merit and are worth observing…
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Discover The Networkshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDiscover The Networks2023-01-20 05:40:072023-01-20 05:47:18Video Catches School Officials Plotting to ‘Trick’ Ohio Parents, Teach Critical Race Theory Even if Banned
Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., details how the elite 1% intend to “divide and rule” in order to achieve their exploitative goals
The world’s top 1% — the ultra-wealthy elite — and the modern empires they control — Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Ag — are responsible for destroying the planet and sending most of humanity into financial and health crises
We’re at an unprecedented point in history when the “civilizing mission for humanity” is technology — technology owned by the 1%
It’s an illusion that technology companies are “creating” these systems that will supposedly make our world a better place — they’re largely extracting, using data mining, including mining your mind
Divide and rule is a necessity for the 1% to continue to hold on to power as protests and unrest increase
Pay attention to the economic policies being pushed while people are divided — that’s really the agenda
The world’s top 0.001% — the ultra-wealthy elite — and the modern empires they control — Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Ag — are not only responsible for destroying the planet and sending most of humanity into financial and health crises, they’re intent on attaining ultimate control. If and when that happens, 99% of people will become disposable.
Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., founder of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in India, details how globalists are exploiting the masses in her book, “Oneness Vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom.” In the video above by After Skool, she expands on how the 0.001% intend to “divide and rule” in order to achieve their exploitative goals.1
A Lesson From Quantum Theory
Shiva is trained as a physicist and initially planned to study atomic energy. But as she grasped the devastation it had caused worldwide, she gave up her idea of being a nuclear physicist and instead went looking for knowledge as a whole. She studied on her own, finding quantum theory,2 which formed the basis of her life’s work:3
“The way you design the world in your mind is the way you relate to it. When you design it as dead matter just to be exploited, you will exploit it. When you design it without any understanding of limits, you will violate the planetary limits.
When you design it with deep recognition of interconnectedness, you will nurture those relationships. And this basic recognition is what I drew from my learnings in quantum theory — that nonlocality, nonseparation, interconnectedness … is the nature of reality.”
However, she explains, within the paradigm of mechanistic thought, there’s a design that didn’t evolve. As such, mechanistic thought is based on the following assumptions:4
We are separate from nature
Nature is constituted of discrete particles separate from each other, which can only relate through violence, force and action by contact
But in the quantum world, Shiva explains, “There is no separability. My thesis was on nonlocality in quantum theory. Everything is interconnected. There are no fixed essentialized qualities that have been built into the way people are looked at, nature is looked at. Potential is the defining quality in the quantum world, and because it’s about potential, it’s also about uncertainty.”5
Shiva states that the mechanistic world is based on a false illusion of determinateness, or a quality of being highly predictable. “In the quantum world, we know we cannot get rid of uncertainty,” she says, citing the uncertainty principle created by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927.
Referring to atoms and subatomic particles, the uncertainty principle maintains that the position and velocity of an object cannot be measured at the same time. “The very concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature,” Britannica notes.6
Further, while in the mechanistic world things are either/or — “you can either be a wave or a particle,” Shiva says — “in the quantum world, you have potential to be both and they’re complementary.” She continues, “When you realize that the world is one interconnected whole you also realize that what appears different is actually different expressions of an interconnected reality.”7
Billionaires’ Technology Has Become the New ‘Mission’
We’re at an unprecedented point in history when the “civilizing mission for humanity” is technology — technology owned by the 1%. It’s an illusion, however, that technology companies are “creating” or inventing these systems that will supposedly make our world a better place.
“They extract,” Shiva says, “They don’t create anything … software programmers create the platforms that they use. Even Bill Gates didn’t really write his basic program. It was two math professors in Dartmouth College.”8
She uses Gates’ Ag One9 as an example, which is basically the idea to make one type of agriculture for the whole world, which will be owned and controlled by Gates from the top down. It’s headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, where Monsanto, acquired by Bayer in 2018,10 Bayer is also headquartered.
This includes digital farming, in which farmers are surveilled and mined for their agricultural data, which is then repackaged and sold back to them. There are parallels throughout society. Shiva explains:11
“We watched what’s going on in India and we pieced it together. So basically he’s financing a lot of data mining from farmers, which will then be packaged as Big Data and sold back to farmers. This is exactly what happened in your 2016 elections. Facebook sold data to Cambridge Analytica.
So when you think of, ‘What are the kind of leaders that we have getting created?’ it’s very important to remember that in these 25 years of corporate deregulation of commerce you basically have a lot of money in the hands of very few people.
And they then are the ones investing in all the companies. The companies are not independent companies anymore. They’re basically billionaire money managed by the investment funds like Blackrock and Vanguard.”
Divide and Rule Is the Plan
Protests and unrest are increasing throughout the world as people grow tired of being controlled and downtrodden by the 1%. Demands for change are surging, so the 1% has rolled out a plan to overcome it — divide and rule.
Shiva believes the East India Company in 1857 set the historic precedence. A revolt occurred that year against oppressive company rule, and the company was taken over by the British state. Up until that point, Hindus and Muslims in India had stood together to defend their land, livelihoods and freedoms.
They identified primarily with their occupations and communities; religion was secondary. But when the crown took over, Shiva says, “They established a policy called divide and rule … it took from about 1857 to about 1920” to essentially divide the population against each other based on their religion. She explains:12
“That partition is still being played out. It’s an incomplete project. So, divide and rule becomes a necessity for the 0.001% to continue to hold on to power. What are the economic policies being pushed while people are divided? Because that’s really the agenda.”
The Duty of Truth
The refusal to cooperate with unjust law was termed a duty of truth by Gandhi. Shiva describes apartheid in 1906, when the British attempted to turn Indians in South Africa into second-class citizens. Indians had to register their race and carry identification. Police officers could enter homes and demand papers, and people were restricted from local trade and certain professions based on their race. “The people said we would rather die,” Shiva says.
Others inspired by Gandhi and the duty of truth include Martin Luther King. “But … when King started to take up economic justice and economic equality issues, that’s when he was assassinated,” Shiva says, “because … you can talk in very sweet ways about civil liberties but you don’t touch economic justice and the economy.”13
The word economy comes from oeconomia, or the art of living. But when this got changed into the art of money-making, it brought on violence. “When you turn the art of living into the art of money-making, which Aristotle called chrematistics, then you have to practice violence against the Earth and violence against others — destroy their livelihoods, destroy their freedoms, take away their resources.”14
Sowing the Seeds of Earth Democracy
With the convergence of Big Tech and artificial intelligence, Shiva fears mechanical work, from radiography to law, will be made redundant, and 99% of people will become disposable. The solution lies in activating our sense of oneness or interconnectedness with all life and sowing the seeds of what Shiva calls Earth democracy:15
“You can either share this beautiful planet with love and abundance and sustainability, or say it’s all mine — every bit of land, every seed, every mind. Because what’s being mined is our mind now, and if we don’t defend the freedoms of all species and the freedoms of all human beings we could see, within 20 to 30 years, a level of disposability built into the structures that humanity will not be able to respond to.”
Currently, democracy has shifted to being “of the corporations by the corporations for the corporations.” Earth democracy calls for a restoration of democracy “of the people by the people for the people,” not only for humans but also for nature.16 According to the ancient Vedas, the universe is divine, and everything therein — even the smallest grass — is an expression of the divine.
The universe exists for the well-being of all, but her gifts must be enjoyed without greed. Taking more than your share is theft, and will only backfire. The solution to true sustainability doesn’t lie with new technology but in relying on the natural “technology” that is the universe.17 Shiva says:18
“This is the time to make oneness and interconnectedness, as one humanity on one planet, the political project of our time. We have to remember we are one humanity. We are part of one Earth, and whatever we do we will not let this basic recognition divide us, either from the Earth or from each other … together we are strong.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MERCOLA Take Control of Your Healthhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMERCOLA Take Control of Your Health2023-01-20 05:04:052023-01-20 07:07:35If This Happens, 99% of Us Will Be Disposable
Asked if more searches for documents were underway at Biden’s Delaware home, the diversity hire Jean-Pierre responded, “We have addressed multiple questions from here. Multiple questions have been answered by the president. I’m just going to continue to be prudent here. I’m going to let this ongoing review that is happening, this legal process that is happening, and let that process continue under the special counsel.”
“I’m not going to comment from here,” she added, claiming the Biden administration has made a habit of staying quiet on Justice Department matters.
Following the presser, the Biden classified documents scandal has exposed Jean-Pierre as not being fit for her role.
“Karine Jean-Pierre has shown that she is not qualified for this job at this level. We’ve seen that now over the last couple of months, because she keeps saying over and over again — as if she’s almost programmed, like she has no ability to think extemporaneously — that the president ‘takes these documents very seriously’,” Fox News contributor Joe Concha said Tuesday on The Story. “In one press conference, she’s literally said that line 17 times. And at the same time, she talks about how transparent the administration has been with the public – while not answering questions.”
Former New York federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy agreed, telling The Story that every time Jean-Pierre speaks, “she’s actually making [the situation] worse.”
Jean-Pierre’s Contempt for Donald Trump, Whom She Considered an “Illegitimate” President Who “Stole” an Election
During a February 10, 2017 appearance on HBO’s Real Time, Jean-Pierre told host Bill Maher: “I think the thing to understand is that, if you are not white, male, straight, you are — you fear a — Donald Trump’s presidency because there is no place for you in a Donald Trump’s presidency.” “He [Trump] ran the most anti-immigration campaign that we have ever seen,” Jean-Pierre added. “He talked about Mexicans, calling them rapists and criminals. He talked about Muslim ban, and it is fearful for all of us…”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Discover The Networkshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDiscover The Networks2023-01-19 07:33:532023-01-19 07:35:30Jean-Pierre Blasted For Dodging Questions on Biden Classified Docs
Gay activist couple accused of sodomizing adopted sons, ages 1 and 9 and distributing home-made porn of the abuse. Sick. Throw them in prison! https://t.co/MTmTtOKOVw
“Whoever succeeds in telling the stories to the children gets to control the future.” That was Kirk Cameron’s answer to people wondering why he’s joined the debate over America’s libraries. As parents everywhere fight to keep graphic content out of their children’s hands, Texas officials are warning the battle is taking an ominous turn. It’s not just the forces of the Left that communities will have to contend with. It’s the federal government, whose new investigation into a local school district could upend every grassroots effort to protect kids.
For leaders in Texas’s Granbury School District, the bomb dropped shortly before Christmas. Officials in the Civil Rights Division of Biden’s Department of Education (DOE) said they’d received a formal complaint from the ACLU that the small community outside Fort Worth was somehow violating the government’s definition of “sex” by pulling books from school library shelves.
The ACLU’s beef dates back to November 2021 when Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) urged the state’s association of school boards to “ensure no child is exposed to pornography or other inappropriate content in a Texas public school.” His letter, which keyed off parents’ growing outrage about the material on school shelves, insisted on greater transparency about the content students can access. Abbott said his office had been contacted by a number of moms and dads who were “rightfully angry” about the “pornographic and obscene” content.
Granbury officials took the governor’s directive to heart, ordering a review of the district’s book titles. But what ultimately landed the district in hot water was a candid conversation Superintendent Jeremy Glenn had with the schools’ librarians — which was eventually leaked to the press. He talked about the conservative make-up of the community and insisted that they would act accordingly. “We do have a very conservative board,” Glenn said in a reference to the two new school board members. “They are elected, and recently more conservative. And so that’s what our community is. That’s what our job is.”
At the end of the day, Glenn insisted, “I don’t want a kid picking up a book, whether it’s about homosexuality or heterosexuality, and reading about how to hook up sexually in our libraries. … And I’m going to take it a step further with you,” the superintendent went on. “There are two genders. There’s male, and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women. And there are women that think they’re men. And again, I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries. … I’m cutting to the chase on a lot of this,” Glenn insisted. “It’s the transgender, LGBTQ, and the sex — sexuality — in books. That’s what the governor has said that he will prosecute people for, and that’s what we’re pulling out.”
Over the next two weeks, Granbury embarked on what the Texas Tribune called “one of the largest book removals in the country, pulling about 130 titles from library shelves for review.” Two months later, the volunteer review committee inexplicably voted to return all but three books that they’d permanently banned.
By then, the audio of Glenn’s meeting had made its way to the media, and liberal news outlets like the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and NBC News pounced, accusing Glenn of anti-LGBT bias. That’s when the local chapter of the ACLU got involved, demanding an apology and calling for every book to be reinstated.
Glenn didn’t oblige, conveying through district spokesman Jeff Meador that all the titles they’d pulled from shelves are “sexually explicit and not age-appropriate.” That said, the libraries “continue to house a socially and culturally diverse collection of books for students to read, including,” he pointed out, “books that analyze and explore LGBTQ+ issues.”
Naturally, that didn’t satisfy the ACLU, whose lawyers decided to involve the federal government in a local dispute that could have a chilling effect nationwide. “If the government finds in the ACLU’s favor,” The Washington Post cautioned, “the determination could have implications for schools nationwide, experts said, forcing libraries to stock more books about LGBTQ individuals and requiring administrators — amid a rising tide of book challenges and bans — to develop procedures ensuring student access to books that some Americans, especially right-leaning parents, deem unacceptable.”
Of course, the heart of the ACLU’s allegation — that Granbury (and Glenn, especially) is violating the Left’s new definition of “sex” — is a stretch by almost every legal standard. The Biden administration may have twisted the word “sex” to mean “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” but that interpretation has never been passed into federal Title IX law.
And yet, the ACLU’s Chloe Kempf maintains (unconvincingly) that the “book removals and also the comments create this pervasively hostile environment.” “Both send a message to the entire community that LGBTQ identities are inherently obscene, worthy of stigmatization — and the book removals uniquely deprive LGBTQ students of the opportunity to read books that reflect their own experiences.”
Conservatives pushed back, insisting that this isn’t about LGBT hostility but age-appropriate content. Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, insisted that this whole controversy amounts to a leftist intimidation campaign. “The ACLU is bullying school districts who have responded to parental concerns about pornographic library books offered to children. Access to pornography at school is not a civil right.” Even if the law had been changed to include “sexual orientation and gender identity” in Title IX, “children still do not have a right to sexually explicit or violent content in public school library books. And school systems are under no obligation to support a publishing industry who can’t sell these books to parents and so sells them to librarians instead.”
Frankly, Kilgannon argued, “This is federal overreach into the education system, which is supposed to be a state issue.” Not to mention that “Biden is weaponizing another government agency: the DOE.”
If the president does intervene, dictating how school libraries handle certain book titles, the issue will almost certainly end up in court. “This isn’t the sort of civil rights issue that requires federal intervention,” Will Flanders of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty argued. “It’s a question about books in schools, not about individual rights being violated.”
Either way, it does show one thing: the potency of the parents’ movement. Cameron, who’s in his own fight to host story hours in the same libraries that allow drag queens, is witnessing the momentum firsthand. As many as 1,000 people turned out in Placentia, Calif. to hear the “Growing Pains” actor read his new book, “As You Grow.”
“I know why parents and grandparents are coming out of the woodwork,” Cameron told The Federalist. “They understand there is a war on children — and nobody’s going to stop it but us.” So if there’s one thing Americans can do, he told the crowd, it’s this: “Don’t just talk about what’s going on. Change what’s going on.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-01-18 14:49:272023-01-19 11:35:51Team Biden Joins the School Library Wars, Launching Federal Investigation
Gay activist couple accused of sodomizing adopted sons, ages 1 and 9 and distributing home-made porn of the abuse. Sick. Throw them in prison! https://t.co/MTmTtOKOVw
”The United States is the most permissive country when it comes to the legal and medical gender transition of children,” according to a 12-country policy review by medical advocacy group Do No Harm. The group compared “different legal requirements for gender change-related treatments and actions” among the U.S. and the 11 countries of Northern and Western Europe. These countries — Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Finland, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom — “share the United States’ broad support for transgenderism” yet “reject the gender-affirming care model for children.”
Do No Harm explained that America has adopted a “gender affirmation” policy for children, which “assumes that gender incongruence can manifest as early as age four and that questioning a minor’s gender self-definition is harmful and unethical. The American Academy of Pediatrics has embraced an affirm-only/affirm-early policy since 2018, and most states abide by its guidance despite withering medical and scientific criticism.” By contrast, some European countries “have explicitly abandoned” the gender-affirming care model and “now discourage automatic deference to a child’s self-declaration on the grounds that the risks outweigh the benefits.” They also recommend “months-long psychotherapy sessions to address co-occurring mental health problems.”
The report proceeded with a country-by-country comparison of requirements for the medical and legal gender transition of children.
American restrictions on puberty blockers vary by state, but “the most permissive states do not impose restrictions,” and blockers have been prescribed “as early as age eight.” Oregonians “are legally entitled” to blockers “from age 15,” with Medicaid assistance and without parental consent. In Iceland, there is “no minimum age” except as a “matter of clinical judgment.” The U.K. permits blockers “from the earliest stages of puberty,” while Belgium, France, and Norway permit blockers from Tanner Stage II, or “once physiological signs of puberty manifest.” Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden allow puberty blockers “from age 12.” Finland allows them “about age 13.” Ireland allows them “under 16 years old.” In tiny Luxembourg, “no official guidance exists,” but “in practice, adolescents almost always receive blockers in a neighboring country.”
Restrictions on prescribing cross-sex hormones (estrogen and testosterone) to minors also vary state by state across the U.S., but “the practice has been documented with parental consent in children under the age of 13.” In Oregon, minors may “access cross-sex hormones from age 15 without consent and with Medicaid assistance.” France has “no age restrictions” on cross-sex hormones, but “clinicians generally will not administer them before Tanner Stage II.” Again, Luxembourg has “no official guidance,” but “Patients almost always receive hormones in a neighboring Country.” In every other European country studied, cross-sex hormones were available “from age 16,” although the U.K. requires that “individuals must have been receiving puberty blockers for at least one year.”
Do No Harm provided few specifics regarding the status of parental consent for these chemical gender transition procedures. They do say that, besides Oregon, “in most states, puberty blockers cannot be administered before age 18 without parental consent,” but they provide no insight on cross-sex hormones. However, California passed a bill in September effectively removing any parental consent requirement.
By contrast, children may not access gender transition chemical treatments until age 16 or 18 in nearly every country. Denmark is the most permissive, allowing children without parental consent to access puberty blockers at 15. In the U.K., “instances of children under 16 receiving blockers without consent are reportedly rare,” although such consent is not required. To access cross-sex hormones without consent in either country, children must be 16. In Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, and Norway, children must be 16 to access either puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, although Norway raises the age for cross-sex hormones to 18 “if the treatment is considered irreversible.” Sweden also allows cross-sex hormones without consent at 16, “so long as the individual is deemed sufficiently mature,” while it bars puberty blockers without consent until age 18. In Belgium, Finland, and France, neither treatment is available without parental consent until a person turns 18.
The report also compared the number of youth gender clinics in the various countries. The U.S. led by far, with “more than 60 pediatric gender clinics and 300 clinics” that “provide hormonal interventions to minors.” France also has many locations because “care is decentralized,” and “any doctor can prescribe treatment for medical transition.”
But after that the number quickly dwindles. Sweden administers all gender transition procedures through four hospitals, of which three provide surgery. Denmark administers gender transition hormones at only three locations. There are only two hospitals or clinics providing medical gender transitions in Belgium, Finland, and soon the U.K., which currently has one. Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Norway have one gender transition facility apiece. Granted, the United States is far larger than many of these countries. But the U.S. has a population 2.5 times larger than all the countries except France, while it has 20 times as many clinics providing hormonal interventions to minors.
Do No Harm also compared the minimum age at which countries allow persons to legally change their gender in civil registries. In the U.S., “there is no minimum age” for federal documentation, such as passports or Social Security cards, but such changes require the consent of both parents. There is more variation in state documentation, such as ID cards and birth certificates, but at least seven states “permit minors to change their birth certificate gender markers with parental consent.”
Three European countries, Iceland, Luxembourg, and the U.K., have policies similar to the U.S. federal government in that there is no age limit, but children under the age of 18 need parental consent to change legally recognized gender. In Norway, gender markers can be changed, with parental permission, from age six, and from age 16 without parental permission. Netherlands also allows 16-year-olds to legally change their gender without parental permission. In Belgium and Ireland, 16-year-olds may change their legal gender identity with parental consent, and 18-year-olds may change it without parental consent. Denmark, Finland, France, and Sweden do not allow minors under the age of 18 to legally change their gender identity.
The U.S. also exceeds most European countries in legally recognizing genders other than male or female. Federal “passports offer an X gender option,” and a sizable number of states allow a gender marker of “X” on identification documents (22 states plus D.C. on driver’s licenses, and 16 states plus D.C. on birth certificates). Only Iceland permits gender variation, allowing “third gender and/or nonbinary designations” on official documents. Denmark and Ireland allow a third gender option on IDs and passports respectively, but their “civil registry is binary.” In the Netherlands, a person may only obtain a gender neutral designation through a court. In the other seven countries, Belgium, Finland, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, and the U.K., “male and female are the only recognized genders.”
“The United States is the most permissive country when it comes to the legal and medical gender transition of children,” concluded the review. “Only France comes close, yet unlike the U.S., France’s medical authorities have recognized the uncertainties involved in transgender medical care for children and have urged ‘great caution’ in its use.”
“Given the growing body of evidence and the European consensus, which is grounded in medical science and common sense,” pleaded Do No Harm, “the United States should reconsider the gender-affirming care model to protect the youngest and most vulnerable patients.”
“I respect everybody and I respect everybody’s choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion.”
Flyers defenseman Ivan Provorov on refusing to wear a rainbow jersey for warm ups during “Pride Night” due to his Russian Orthodox faith. pic.twitter.com/wCUl8slmRB
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-01-18 14:35:242023-01-19 15:54:29Report: U.S. Is ‘Most Permissive Country’ for Minor Gender Transition
For a man who ran for president to save the soul of America from racism, former segregationists’ buddy Joe Biden resembles few people more than the infamously abusive police chief Bull Connor. Both allowed domestic terrorists aligned with the Democratic Party to vandalize, bomb, and set fire to their opponents’ churches with impunity while using maximum force to arrest peaceful, Christian, protesters.
Sixty years later, little more than the names and faces have changed: Connor’s allies rallied behind the banner of white supremacy, while Biden’s supporters mobilize around “abortion on demand without apology.” The Biden administration’s refusal to protect pro-life Christians bears an eerie resemblance to Bull Connor’s collusion and selective prosecution. Imagine how civil rights protesters would have fared if George Wallace won the 1964 presidential election, and you get a sense of Biden’s treatment of peaceful, prayerful, pro-life advocates.
‘We’re Going to Allow You 15 Minutes….’
The Freedom Riders, who tested Southern segregation laws from Virginia to New Orleans, planned to stop in Birmingham on May 14, 1961. The Ku Klux Klan — and the Alabama lawman they helped elect Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor — had other plans. The KKK plotted a series of coordinated strikes against the protesters spanning multiple cities. Klansmen knew the details of the demonstrators’ travel itinerary, because the Birmingham sheriff’s department told them — and the sheriff’s department knew, because the FBI told them. As the protesters departed Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. warned the Freedom Riders, “You will never make it through Alabama.”
In the days leading up to their arrival, Bull Connor personally gave the Klan the green light to rough up Yankee “meddlers.” Connor’s right-hand man, Birmingham Police Department Sgt. Thomas H. Cook, arranged for a meeting with a man named Gary Thomas Rowe, a member of a violent chapter of the Klan — but also an FBI informant. Historian Raymond Arsenault recounts the scene:
Unaware that Rowe planned to relay his words to the Birmingham FBI office, Cook laid out an elaborate plot to bring the Freedom Ride to a halt in Birmingham. He assured Rowe that other members of the Birmingham Police Department, as well as officials of the Alabama Highway Patrol, were privy to the plan and could be counted on to cooperate. “You will work with me and I will work with you on the Freedom Riders,” he promised. “We’re going to allow you 15 minutes. …You can beat ‘em, bomb ‘em, maim ‘em, kill ‘em. I don’t give a s***. There will be absolutely no arrests. You can assure every Klansman in the country that no one will be arrested in Alabama for that fifteen minutes.”
“By God, if you’re going to do this thing,” Cook later told the Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Shelton, “do it right.” Similarly, Bull Connor instructed the Klan to “make them look like a bulldog got a hold of them.”
The Klan didn’t have to be told twice; they planned to strike twice. They swarmed the first of the two vehicles, a Greyhound bus, when it arrived in nearby Anniston, breaking its windows and slashing its tires. Police escorted the protesters as far as the city limits … where the Klansmen were waiting. One Klansman threw an explosive device into the back of the bus and, as protesters scurried out of the door for their lives, the mob beat them savagely. “Then, God Almighty intervened,” remembered Hank Thomas: The bus’s gas tank exploded in two bursts, frightening the crowd away. “A miracle happened in Anniston.”
Klansmen posed as passengers of the Trailways bus carrying the other group of Freedom Riders. In Anniston, the Klan insisted the riders segregate the bus and pummeled several passengers — including Walter Bergman, then age 61 — to make their point. Although Bergman would remained partially paralyzed for the rest of his life and have to learn to feed himself again, a local policeman told his assailants, “Don’t worry about no lawsuits. I ain’t seen a thing.”
Unfortunately, the real violence awaited in Birmingham. Confident they would face no repercussions, the Klan invited CBS News reporter Howard K. Smith to witness the violence as the bloodied protesters descended the bus stairs to desegregate the terminal’s lunch counters. A mob of Klansmen (including the FBI informant, Rowe) and members of the National States Rights Party swarmed, sometimes beating protesters 12-on-one. The melee continued until one of Connor’s detectives, Red Self, told the Klansmen: “Get the boys out of here. I’m ready to give the signal for the police to move in.”
Faced with local intransigence, the FBI would soon arrest the four people responsible for firebombing the Greyhound, but it would be far from the last act of unpunished violence. A tragic 40 unsolved bombings over two decades earned the city the nickname “Bombingham.”
Not content to outsource his brutality to the Klan, Bull Connor ordered his police to use all means necessary to quash the message of Christian civil rights protesters.
Release the Guilty, Jail the Innocent
Bull Connor’s police proved more likely to arrest peaceful protesters than the Klansmen perpetrators. In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” courtesy of Connor’s constabulary. As King and his supporters went to jail for “parading without a permit” (holding unauthorized demonstrations), Connor said:
[W]e are not going to stand for this in Birmingham. And if necessary we will fill the jail full, and we don’t care whose toes we step on. I am saying now to these meddlers from out of our city, the best thing for them to do is stay out if they don’t want to get slapped in jail. … I’ve never seen anyone yet look for trouble who wasn’t able to find it.
Volunteers evaporated from the desegregation campaign. King’s group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), responded with “The Children’s Crusade,” recruiting more than 1,000 schoolchildren to march through Birmingham on May 2 and 3, 1963. As the youngsters left the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church carrying signs with such messages as, “Segregation is a sin,” Connor’s men arrested 959 the first night. But they did not merely apprehend the marchers: Police blasted young children with high-powered firehoses, beat them with batons, and sicced police dogs on them.
The cruelty was the point. The pretense of law masked ruthless hatred, as segregationists used overwhelming force to discourage them from ever again publicly voicing views disfavored by the powerful.
As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Joe Biden Bull-ies the Pro-Life Movement
Fast forward 60 years, and violent hatemongers with powerful political allies have again received free rein to terrorize their nonviolent, Christian foes. But Jane’s Revenge has enjoyed more than a 15-minute reign of terror. Since the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling last May 2, pro-abortion fanatics have launched a wave of arsons, vandalism, and death threats against at least 101 pro-life churches or pregnancy resource centers. Abortion activists firebombed pro-life pregnancy resource centers in the same way Bull Connor let the Klan firebomb Freedom Riders’ buses — with the same number of arrests: zero. Leftist extremists perpetrated 52 attacks before the FBI even announced its investigation.
This wave of violence, like most cowardly violence, targets the powerless — unborn babies, their desperate mothers, and the nonviolent Christian churches and nonprofits that serve them — but this wave also victimized the powerful with impunity. On June 13, two people threw a lit flare into the offices of Washington State Rep. Andy Barkis (R). Eight days later, vandals smashed the windows at the local office of U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.). Like the Klan in Alabama, pro-abortion fanatics feel confident enough to leave their calling card — often scrawling, “If abortion isn’t safe, neither are you” on pro-life women’s centers and churches — and to alert the media they will take “increasingly drastic measures.”
Biden’s nonfeasance embodies the administration’s defiant message that its ideological opponents enjoy no legal protection — a far cry from the promise Biden made the day after the media declared him winner of the 2020 election: “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did.” The atmosphere of hatred has resulted in an 84-year-old pro-life woman being shot. (The male suspect said he shot her by accident.)
At least one congressman has connected the dots. The wave of anti-life terrorism represents “the death cult’s echo of the KKK’s burning cross — brazen, violent intimidation,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). “But the federal government responded to the KKK. Where is the Biden Justice Department amid this violent campaign of national scope?” The administration, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), instead aim to “put a stop” to pro-life pregnancy resource centers.
“To my knowledge, no one — no one — has been prosecuted under the FACE Act,” noted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) as House Republicans passed a resolution condemning violence against pregnancy resource centers on January 11. J. Edgar Hoover, who shared the racial views of his time, arrested the Anniston bombers in a matter of days. In a world of high-definition security cameras and facial recognition software, Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have apparently arrested no one in eight months.
At least, no one who shares the administration’s extreme commitment to abortion. “But if you’re a pro-life activist, and you’re praying outside of an abortion clinic like Mark Houck, guess what happens to you?” asked Jordan. “The FBI kicks in your door, arrests you, puts you in handcuffs, and does it in front of your wife and seven children,” using dozens of heavily armed agents. Biden’s DOJ meted out similar treatment to Paul Vaughn, a 55-year-old father of 11. Just as black-and-white footage of Bull Connor unleashing his dogs on children inspired national revulsion of segregation, Biden’s overreach should inspire outrage at federal collusion with the abortion industry.
🚨 One of the pro-life leaders targeted by Biden's DOJ sent me footage of the early morning FBI raid on his family home. Paul Vaughn was placed in handcuffs by armed FBI agents in front of his children just before school drop-off. Watch as his wife pleads for answers mid-arrest: https://t.co/lUP6tJOSzWpic.twitter.com/XeYComC6mZ
As pregnancy resource centers burned, in July Biden’s Justice Department established the Reproductive Rights Task Force to take “proactive and defensive legal action” to protect the abortion industry (and punish its foes) — and tapped as its leader Vanita Gupta, who as a “civil rights” officer in Obama’s DOJ tried to force all public schools to allow men to use women’s restrooms, showers, and overnight accommodations or lose all federal funding. She applied her ideological fervor equally well to abortion. Biden’s Justice Department arrested 26 pro-life advocates by last October, with more following, including:
Franciscan friar Fr. Fidelius Mocinski (whose birth name was Christopher), just as local New Jersey prosecutors dropped charges for conducting his “Red Rose Rescues”: entering abortion facilities and giving mothers red roses. In this case, he lay down in front of an abortion facility’s entrance, just as protesters in the ‘60s laid down in front of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential limousine. (“If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car,” cracked segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama (D) during the 1968 presidential campaign, “it’ll be the last car he’ll ever lay down in front of.”);
Eleven defendants who entered an abortion facility in Tennessee in March 2021. If convicted, some of the defendants stand to serve up to 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars;
Pastor Daniel Courney of Enfield, N.J., one month after it wrung an agreement out of him not to commit “future FACE Act violations” — which, out of fear, would effectively cause him to end his presence outside abortion facilities; and
Bevelyn Williams and Edmee Chavannes, who happen to be black women from the South, for allegedly violating the FACE Act as far back as June 2020. (Curiously, their indictment begins with peaceful pro-life activity in 2019.) In one alleged violation in the indictment, Chavannes told an abortion facility employee, “Do not touch me.”
The arrest total seems all the more lopsided, since pro-life women’s centers are 22 times more likely to be attacked than abortion facilities. Both Gupta and Garland touted their work prosecuting pro-life advocates at a civil rights assembly last December. Both invoked Martin Luther King Jr.
As noted, in many cases the Biden administration presses pro-life advocates to sign agreements not to protest any more — a similar tactic employed by the Obama-Biden administration. A federal judge questioned whether the Obama-Biden administration’s prosecution of Mary Susan Pine “was the product of a concerted effort between the Government and the [abortion provider], which began well before the date of the incident at issue, to quell Ms. Pine’s activities.” (Ultimately, the DOJ paid Pine $120,000 in legal fees.) One could be forgiven for asking the same question of these cases.
A trial may conclude some of these acts violated the law, just as civil rights protesters violated the law of their day — the law their peaceful, prayerful actions aimed to change. But today’s prayerful pro-life advocates see their homes raided, not aided, by the federal government led by a vice president who raised bail money for the BLM’s “mostly peaceful” rioters. They face enormous legal bills, a criminal record, huge fines, and perhaps more than a decade in prison.
Despite these pressures, the pro-life movement has not buckled, as the terrorists and their federal government enablers wished. When bombed, they have rebuilt. When denied protection, they have secured their ministries of mercy. When denied justice, they hired their own private investigators. They have suffered long and done good. They have emerged from the fiery crucible of persecution with a stronger resolve to help the weak and save the innocent. The pro-life movement is “hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed — always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body” … And, one day, manifested in our laws.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-01-18 14:05:342023-01-25 09:37:28Joe Biden: The Bull Connor of the Pro-Abortion Movement
Yesterday, I told you how government healthcare programs are getting bigger and how this is the wrong direction for the country. I also mentioned a relatively new theory from the Left – social determinants of health [SDOH] – that is about to make government healthcare programs even bigger.
Social determinants of health is the idea that social factors like housing, income, and employment have more to do with a person’s health than do individual risk factors like behavior and genetics. So, if you give poor people free housing, free food, free employment services, free education, free transportation, other free services, and guarantee their income, their health will get better. This will reduce hospital admissions, as well as overall health spending, the theory goes. At least that’s the cover story. The real agenda is radical egalitarian redistribution of income. But the theory sounds good. It sounds right. It sounds plausible. However, there’s just one problem. There’s very little evidence for this happy-face assertion. Billions have already spent on the theory, but the track record of real-world results is not good.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped the government from rushing pell-mell into social determinants of health and into the arms of the people pushing it. The Biden administration recently announced it is giving states discretion to cover social services under their Medicaid programs.
No one is asking how much this is going to cost. The federal deficit is already $421 billion for the current fiscal year which began in October. Sorry, but Uncle Sugar doesn’t have unlimited pots of money. If the true agenda is redistribution, how much more do you think there is to get with a deficit like that? Would we even be talking about spending money on social determinants of health if we had to balance our budget? Also, no one is asking about the downsides. Nothing in life is perfect. Shouldn’t lawmakers be informed of the negative consequences before being asked to vote on such a thing? And speaking of Congress, this sounds like a major change that cannot be done by agency regulation alone under recent Supreme Court jurisprudence. So where is Congress on this? Are they falling down on the job again by not reining in agencies from committing us to huge new expenditures without congressional authorization? Why am I the only one asking these questions?
Tax-exempt hospitals spent $2.5 billion on social determinants of health – housing, employment, education, and food security – from 2017 to 2019. They are obligated to provide community benefit in exchange for their tax exemptions. But their spending on social determinants initiatives has fallen off more recently because the evidence such initiatives are effective is limited, a study found. Another study found social spending reduces unnecessary healthcare use but the costs outweigh the benefits. Other researchers found no association between overall community benefit spending and hospital readmission rates. These researchers concluded “the evidence for health outcome improvements from interventions focused on social determinants is thin…. This is very little evidence on which to base billions in investment….” The study concluding the costs outweighed the benefits found $3.4 million in healthcare savings after $22.4 million was spent on a social determinants case management program. Costs running seven times bigger than the savings – doesn’t sound like a smart investment to me.
This begs the question: if the evidence is so thin and even counter to what proponents claim, why proceed? Why is the federal government itching to spend more money on social determinants of health? Especially when social determinants theory has been criticized for ignoring the importance on health outcomes of personal choices and responsibility regarding alcohol, tobacco, junk food, drugs, and gambling. Moreover, in a previous commentary, I criticized social determinants theory for ignoring the magnet effect of free stuff from the government drawing ever-larger numbers of people into government dependency. Wrong direction.
The current administration has made no bones about working towards ‘equity’, ensuring equal outcomes, and redistribution. Social determinants of health theory – which comes from the redistributionist World Health Organization – is tailor-made for the Biden administration’s goals, whether the theory makes any sense or not.
In making its announcement states can add social determinants to their Medicaid programs, the administration said it will require states to show their social outlays are cost-effective, something the research has failed to show convincingly, so far. Whether the administration really means it is anybody’s guess, but Republicans on Capitol Hill need to police this to make sure the analysis is on the up and up and to shut the initiative down if it turns out it’s just another redistributionist boondoggle without any real benefit, aside from making redistributionists feel good about being so virtuous in giving away other people’s money.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) considered having FBI agents monitor President Joe Biden’s lawyers as they rifled through classified documents before ultimately rejecting the idea, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Tuesday.
Biden’s lawyers found classified materials at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington, D.C., just before the midterm elections. The president’s legal team then conducted a search of Biden’s properties for other such materials. The president’s lawyers and the DOJ discussed the possibility of having FBI agents monitor the search but later decided against it, according to the WSJ.
The two parties instead agreed to notify the DOJ of any classified materials they found, after which law enforcement would promptly remove the documents from the premises, according to the WSJ.
WSJ EXCLUSIVE "the two sides agreed that Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys would inspect the homes, notify the Justice Department as soon as they identified any other potentially classified records, and arrange for law-enforcement authorities to take them." https://t.co/fKRZQzDDyI
In addition to the materials found at the Penn Biden Center, Biden’s lawyers found additional documents next to his Corvette in the garage at his Wilmington, Delaware, home in December. More documents have been discovered at his home throughout January.
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday appointed former U.S. Attorney Robert Hur as special counsel to investigate President Joe Biden’s handling of the classified documents. “The extraordinary circumstances here require the appointment of a special counsel for this matter,” Garland said in a statement.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment about the alleged plan.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-01-18 13:42:452023-01-18 16:09:52REPORT: DOJ Decided Against Having FBI Agents Monitor Biden’s Lawyers As They Rifled Through Classified Docs
This is why they don’t want the surveillance tapes released.
As one commenter opined, “If the footage supported the leftist narrative it would have been released almost immediately. Instead the left wants to hide the footage because it wants to hide what really happened that day.”
Body-worn camera footage obtained by American Greatness of a D.C. Metropolitan police officer on duty on January 6, 2021, shows the chaos unfolding in real-time that day and how law enforcement’s response to the protest led to rising tension and deadly violence.
Officer Terrence Craig, an 11-year veteran of the force, testified last week in the criminal trial of Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man notoriously photographed with his feet on a desk in then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office on January 6, 2021. Nearly two-and-a-half hours of video was captured by Craig’s body-worn camera, providing an uninterrupted and shocking view of what happened inside and outside the building.
Never-before-seen interactions with police and protesters bolster demands by House Republicans to release all surveillance video recorded by Capitol security cameras on January 6.
Craig’s video starts with a group of D.C. Metro and Capitol Police advancing toward the west side of the building at 2:30 p.m. The first physical breach occurred about 15 minutes beforehand; Capitol police had used “nonlethal” munitions such as flashbangs, pepper balls, and tear gas on the crowd assembled outside on Capitol grounds for roughly an hour—the first time in department history that officers were ordered to use such dangerous crowd control devices on political protesters.
D.C. police were ordered to dress in full riot gear, including gas masks, face shields, gloves, and ballistic vests. Under cross-examination by Joseph McBride, one of Barnett’s defense attorneys, Craig admitted the officers were “fully geared up” before taking their positions.
McBride: So you’re fully geared up. You’re strapped up from head to toe? Craig: Yes. McBride: Ready to rock and roll? Craig: Yes.
And “rock and roll” they did. The footage showed a dramatic shift in tone from the massive crowd assembled on the Capitol lawn as jack-booted cops arrived on the scene. Craig admitted as much. “[It] was peaceful heading up to the Capitol,” he told McBride. “You can hear the noise and the sounds, and you see the officers on the side.”
But chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A!” quickly dissipated as the crowd grew agitated at the sight of police officers, faces obscured while dressed in military-type gear, forming groups on the upper terrace. (At least a few SWAT officers can be seen mingling with local police at around 2:45 p.m.)
Police continued to douse the crowd with chemical spray even though protesters were not attempting to breach a line of officers down below.
Craig entered the Rotunda around 2:50 p.m., about five minutes after the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt. The area at first appears sparsely populated with protesters and police; in one scene, officers appear to be tending to the injuries of an elderly man lying on the floor.
Physical and verbal confrontations started inside the Rotunda around 3:10 p.m. as police forcibly tried to move the increasingly packed crowd out of the area. “Do you feel big and strong now?” one woman asked the officers. “Does that get you off pushing around a bunch of women? A bunch of fucking unarmed women?” A female voice is then heard screaming, claiming she’s “trying to” get out of the building.
Craig walks throughout the building, at parts chaotic and other parts relatively calm. One man approached Craig to explain that police took his cell phone and asked how he could get it back. Craig’s answers are unintelligible, impaired by the gas mask and face shield. “Sir, I can’t understand you,” the man said as he followed Craig down a set of stairs.
“Wait, is this the Capitol?” the man asked Craig. “Are you serious?” he replied. “I’ve never seen it,” the man said, underscoring the fact many individuals had never before been in the Capitol and did not know where to go or how to exit.
Craig then takes a position outside the building around 3:50 p.m. amid a heavy police presence. The situation is relatively calm. Chants of “We the People” can be heard.
Some police are again confronted by protesters. “Are y’all gonna tear gas us?” one unidentified man said to a line of officers. One D.C. Metro police officer nodded his head. “It’s we the people, not we the cops,” another man shouted. By that point, three Trump supporters were dead, either wholly or partially due to excessive force.
At 4:20, Craig and several other officers suddenly rush back into the building and march toward the lower west terrace tunnel, the scene of the most violent clashes between police and protesters. (This is the same location where police are caught on camera beating women, including Victoria White.)
As Craig approached the mouth of the tunnel, angry shouts can be heard. “You need to stop! Stop!” one individual yelled at police. Several other men can be heard screaming for help while police spray more chemical gas into the crowd.
At least three men and a few officers are seen dragging the lifeless body of Rosanne Boyland to the mouth of the tunnel. Her shirt is pulled up near her head; one man is attempting to administer CPR. Previously-released footage and eyewitness accounts indicate that Boyland, 34, likely died after succumbing to the effects of toxic gas sprayed by police in the enclosed space and what appears to be a beating by another D.C. Metro officer.
“She’s fucking dead! This is on you, motherfuckers!” one man screamed at the officers, who continued to spray the men tending to Boyland. “This is the woman you killed, you fuckers!”
Some throw items at the front line of police as Boyland’s body is dragged face-up through the tunnel and into the building. Physical confrontations with officers continued for another 20 minutes.
Craig relayed his version of events to McBride. “I saw the dead young lady, and they dropped her right in front of me,” Craig calmly explained. “They just brought her and said, ‘Hey, do your job and take care of her.’”
(After prosecutors objected to the line of questions, Judge Christopher Cooper instructed McBride to avoid “[talking] about the circumstances of people dying.”)
Several men involved in the confrontations related to Boyland’s death were arrested, detained, and charged with assaulting police officers. The Department of Justice and news media have carefully controlled the narrative, portraying protesters as the perpetrators of violence rather than the victims, while justifying the fatalities of four Trump supporters on January 6. (Boyland was officially pronounced dead at 6:09 p.m. The D.C. coroner later claimed she died of a drug overdose, a dubious conclusion given public evidence to the contrary.)
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2023-01-18 09:54:502023-01-18 09:54:50New Body Worn Camera Footage from J6 Supports Calls for Release of All Video
This kind of magical thinking lends itself to fanaticism. If one assumes that Allah is withholding rain because women aren’t wearing hijab (which must also be why it never, ever rains in non-Muslim countries), then one may also assume that one suffers any misfortune or setback in life because of disobedience to Allah. Someone who thinks that way will become ever more vigilant in his observance of Islam, and of course the pinnacle of observance of Islam is jihad.
A hadith has a Muslim asking Muhammad: “Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward).” Muhammad replied, “I do not find such a deed.” (Bukhari 4.52.44)
The Supreme Leader’s representative in the city of Karaj says the reason for low precipitation in the country is a lack of hijab observance of hijab, after many women took off their veils following months of protests.
Mohammad-Mehdi Hosseini Hamedani, the Friday prayer imam of the city, reiterated that observance of hijab should be enforced strictly in society.
Describing anyone who unveils in public as an enemy, he emphasized that all such people must be confronted by the state. “It is not possible to imagine that we are living in an Islamic country when we enter some institutions, shopping malls, pharmacies, etc.!” he said, calling on the authorities to warn shops and malls that serve women who have removed their hijab and close them down if warnings did not suffice.
This is not the first time that the Islamic Republic’s hardliners are linking Islamic rituals to drought or natural disasters….
Prosecutor General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri in 2019 said, “The judicial system does not allow women to unveil in public, because it causes natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes in the country.”…
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2023-01-18 07:49:462023-01-18 10:05:55Islamic Republic of Iran: Leading Imam Says Drought Has Come Because Women Aren’t Wearing Hijab
Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) has been tapped as the new chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and even though the new Congress has barely gotten started, he already has the censorious Left up in arms. Newsweek reported last Monday that Trump nominated Green to be Secretary of the Army, but “he ended up withdrawing his nomination from consideration for the role in 2017 after coming under fire for past comments about members of the LGBTQ community, particularly transgender people.” It seems that Green said: “If you poll the psychiatrists, they’re going to tell you transgender is a disease.” Horror of horrors! Everyone can see that men who think they’re women and vice versa are as sane and well-adjusted as the day is long. And now it has come to light that Green has violated Leftist pieties in another way as well: he has a history of making “anti-Muslim comments.”
The HuffPo sounded the alarm on this Thursday, doing its level best to portray Green as a racist, redneck yahoo. HuffPo claimed that Green, whom it identified as “a physician, Iraq War veteran and former GOP state senator,” that is, just the sort of person Leftists abhor, once said “that Iraqis smelled like ‘curry mixed with sweat.’” Sabina Mohyuddin of the American Muslim Advisory Council fumed: “If you hold stereotypes about communities, how can you effectively move on issues that are really nuanced and require a greater understanding of the issues?”
However, Rachel Del Guidice, Green’s communications director, shot back that “some media outlets cut and spliced” what Green said, and added: “Rep. Green has not, and will not ever, force his religion on anyone. He believes that every American has a right to defend their country. Having served three tours of duty overseas during the War on Terror, Rep. Green acted as a steadfast protector of everyone in this nation. Vilifying people of faith because they don’t agree with progressive policies is against America’s founding principles — the very principles he fought to protect.”
The HuffPo, however, wasn’t done. It claimed also that Green “once said he didn’t want students in Tennessee to learn about Islam.” This came up at a Tea Party meeting in 2016, “when an audience member read a passage from a textbook that correctly stated that Muslims believe in all the prophets in the Old and New Testament,” and Green replied, “When you start teaching the pillars of Islam … we will not tolerate that in this state.” According to the HuffPo, Green went on to say that “if students did have to learn about Islam…they should only learn ‘the history of the Ottoman Empire’ and ‘the assault of Islam out into the Levant and North Africa and into Constantinople.’”
You see? He’s ignorant as well as racist! And so Sumayyah Waheed of Muslim Advocates, which the HuffPo says is a “national civil rights group based in Washington, D.C.,” declared: “Rep. Green’s well-documented history of hate speech against Muslims, LGBTQ people, and immigrants made him unfit to be Secretary of the Army, and that history makes him unfit to chair the House Homeland Security Committee. As chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, Mark Green is a threat to Muslims ― especially to those that live at the intersections of the communities he has gleefully attacked for political gain.”
But the HuffPo, true to form, doesn’t bother to tell you that what Green was actually talking about was his opposition to Islamic proselytizing and indoctrination in public schools, which has been abundantly documented. Green was pushing back against the whitewashed version of Islam that is taught in all too many public school textbooks around the country, but of course the HuffPo doesn’t give you even a hint that there was ever a controversy over the way Islam was taught in public school textbooks.
The only thing that could legitimately be seen as offensive is his alleged statement that Iraqis smelled like “curry mixed with sweat,” although to jump from there to the claim that he is a “threat to Muslims” is beyond ridiculous. It’s certainly impolite, at the very least, to say it, but I’m sure Americans smell like all sorts of strange things to non-Americans, too, and HuffPo is making a big deal out of a pungent quip in order to try to defame and destroy Green.
This is, of course, how the “Islamophobia” industry always operates: quotes without context given the worse possible spin, no explanation or rebuttal allowed, and demonstrably true statements presented as not only false, but offensive. These gutter tactics have worked wonderfully well for the Left in the past, but people are beginning to wake up. Green may not lose his chairmanship over these remarks; if he doesn’t, that may be an indication that the new House leadership really does have some spine.
Here at PJ Media, we’re always on top of the stories that the establishment media doesn’t want to report, or spins beyond all recognition. Want to know what’s really happening with the new Republican House? We’ve got it! And you can get access to even more first-rate content when you become a PJ Media VIP member. VIPs get deeper dives into important issues as well as podcasts and an ad-free experience. VIPs also have more fun, whiter teeth, fresher breath, and a certain sly charm that people find absolutely winning. With VIP Gold, it gets even better. VIP Gold membership gives you access to all of the Townhall family of sites, including Hot Air, Twitchy, Bearing Arms, and RedState, along with live chats. A PJ Media VIP membership is a tremendous value on its own, but we currently have a 40% off deal with the promo code SAVEAMERICA. Sign up today!
EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2023-01-18 07:35:362023-01-18 11:45:37The New House Homeland Security Committee Chair Already Has the Left Enraged
Here we are again, more election fraud, more election interference, and yet there is no redress, no recourse. No action. We are living a dystopian nightmare.
The special counsel who was appointed to study the 2020 election in Wisconsin submitted his official report, in which he determined that the millions of dollars that Mark Zuckerberg spent on the Wisconsin election violated the state’s laws in regard to bribery.
That’s beside the multiple other issues the special counsel found, which included unconstitutional drop boxes, illegal directives from the elections commission in regard to nursing homes, as well as problems with the voter rolls themselves.
“Shall Paper live, or Ink/Since Brass and Marble Can’t Withstand/This Iron Age’s Violating Hand?” — Johannes de Bosco
The University of Southern California (that’s USC to you and me) has been thrust into the limelight yet again. In 2019, and for several years following, it was in the news as a major participant in the “Varsity Blues” scandal; rich parents were inveigled into paying bribes to the university’s water polo coach, so that their children might be admitted, as potential varsity players of the sport, to USC. It’s a university that as part of its online advertisement for itself says that “USC has conferred honorary degrees on 29 billionaires.” I’m not exactly sure why that should impress anyone, but some people at USC think it should; no doubt USC has its reasons that reason does not know. Some eyebrows were raised when USC agreed to pay its new football coach $10 million a year; not everyone on the faculty – you know, those old fogies who teach such frivolities as literature, history, and philosophy — were pleased by this demonstration of USC’s priorities. But what do those people know? Have they ever had to meet a payroll? A winning football team pays their salaries. They had better stop complaining.
And now the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work (USCSDPSSW for short) has put USC the news again. The school has just announced that it has decided to ban the word “field” from its curriculum. No longer will anyone at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, whether faculty members, or staff, or students, be permitted to use the word “field.” From here on out, it’s strictly forbidden. The story of this remarkably thoughtful act of anti-racism can be found here: “Elite University Department Bans Use of Word ‘Field,’ Claiming It’s Too Racist,” by Alexa Schwerha, Daily Signal,
The University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work will no longer use the word “field” in its curriculum or its practices as part of its anti-racist framework, according to an email reportedly sent Monday.
The school reportedly stripped the word from use due to alleged ties to “anti-Black” and “anti-immigrant” rhetoric, according to the email sent by the Practicum Education Department to the campus community, faculty, staff, and students. The school informed [sic] that the word “practicum” would be used instead to “ensure [its] use of inclusive language and practice.”
“This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language,” the email reportedly reads. “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.”
The revised language aligns with several anti-racist initiatives the school abides by, including the Council on Social Work Education’s Advancing Antiracism in Social Work Education and the Eliminate Racism Grand Challenge for Social Work, according to the email.
“In solidarity with universities across the nation, our goal is not just to change language but to honor and acknowledge incline [sic] and reject white supremacy, anti-immigrant and anti-blackness ideologies,” the email continues. “Words are powerful, but even more so is action. We are committing to further align our actions, behaviors, and practices with anti-racism and anti-oppression, which requires taking a close and critical look at our profession—our history, our biases, and our complicity in past and current injustices.”
The email then claimed the school would “train social work students” to “understand and embody social and racial justice” and told the campus community to “hold each other accountable.”
USC, the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, and the Practicum Education Department did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Don’t forgive them, Lord, at the USCSDPSSW they know exactly what they do. They are beyond all appeals to common sense. They will not engage – because they don’t know how to do so – in discussions about the right use of words. Delicacy, tact, intelligence – don’t even ask. Their every comical word-banning – don’t think they will stop with “field” — should be held up for ridicule, every jot and tittle of idiocy exposed, while those who refuse to get with the program should move unobserved from campus to campus, quietly distributing copies of Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” and even more important, Ian Robinson’s The Survival of English.
Shouldn’t we do away entirely with the word “field”? If it summons up, as we are being asked to believe, images of black slaves in fields of tall cotton (but it was Johnny Cash, a white man, who sang about “them old cotton fields back home”), and Mexican workers in the bean fields and orange groves of sunny California, then it shouldn’t be banned just from the USCSDPSSW. It should be banned everywhere. Anti-racism demands it.
Think of all the possibilities. In sports, the USC Trojans run out onto the football practicum. Everyone experiences the collective thrill of anti-racism as they hear the announcer shout “they’re on the Prac-Ti-Cum and ready to go.” Baseball – same thing. The practicum of dreams will now have players catching balls at center, right, and left practicums.
In USC art classes, students will study such works of Van Gogh as “Wheat-practicum with a lark,” “The green wheat-practicum behind the Asylum painting,” and “Wheat-practicum with crows.” It takes a little getting used to, but just keep at it, and you’ll soon get the hang of it. And each time you refrain from saying the word “field,” you will have won a little victory for anti-racism. Rosa Parks would be pleased.
In the Department of Physics at USC, that last lonely professor who refuses to get on board with string theory, that is still all the rage, should announce that he is still working on trying to come up with a Unified Practicum Theory. You’re unfamiliar with that? Here’s what it is: in particle physics, it’s an attempt to describe all fundamental forces and the relationships between elementary particles in terms of a single theoretical framework. In physics, forces can be described by practicums that mediate interactions between separate objects.” There. That shouldn’t be hard to understand. A special house blend of quantum mechanics and general — or is it special? — relativity.
And let’s not stop with banning only the word “field” from our collective vocabularies and consciousnesses. There are so many other words that need to be excised from our scandalously offensive lexicons. Take the word “bend,” as in “the slaves had to bend over as they picked the cotton in their practicums.” Let’s fix it: “the slaves had to ____their torsos as they picked the cotton in their practicums.” Fill in the blank. Anything you come up with will be better than “bend.” Then do the same to transform “a bend in the river” and “South Bend, Indiana” and “bend it like Beckham.” See – you can even have fun as you deracistize your language.
What about the word “cotton” itself? I bought a cotton polo shirt the other day, and when I got home I couldn’t stop thinking about those held in bondage in the antebellum South picking the very same stuff that my shirt was made of, and I felt so…so racist. I should have been more attentive to my language. I should have taught myself to think of my recent purchase as a “shirt made of a soft white fibrous substance that surrounds the seeds of a tropical and subtropical plant and is used as textile fiber and thread for sewing.” And from now on I will. Now, isn’t that better?
I fear there is no end to this. There are so many words — thousands, maybe tens of thousands — that will need to be replaced. Whole departments of language police will spend years to work on the problem. We’ll need to get rid of “master bedroom” and “master class” and “Master and Margarita.” We’ll need to ban “overalls” and “dungarees.” And “back” of course, which makes us think of “back of the bus.” We can’t have “back.” Oh, and “bus.” And “tree.” We can’t have “tree.” Do I have to draw you a diagram? Goodness, what work we have ahead of us. And not a moment too soon. Let’s be grateful to the hyper-vigilant people at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work (USCSDPSSW) who led the way. And now we have a solemn duty to take what they’ve begun to another level.
Sheila Jackson Lee introduces bill that criminalizes criticism of a “non-White person” by a White
“The bill says any White person who criticizes immigration or vilifies any “non-White person or group” can be charged with committing a federal hate crime.”https://t.co/zAEijeigW9
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2023-01-17 09:27:562023-01-18 15:26:05The Graves of Academe: USC School of Social Work Bans ‘Field’
